Support Solana Beach’s “Rise Above Plastics” – Public Hearing on Wednesday, April 25

Solana Beach is taking “alarming” action Wednesday and needs our respectful presence and active support in joining other thoughtful cities around the globe which have banned single-use plastic bags. The Solana Beach City Council will be holding a public hearing on Wednesday, 6pm at the Solana Beach City Hall, located at 635 South Highway 101 Solana Beach, CA 92075, for the proposed plastic bag reduction ordinance.

A growing list of cities have taken similar actions to reduce production and use of single-use plastic bags.

Surfers, swimmers, fishermen and boaters know of these ominous and highly notorious pollutants in our litter stream. Plastic bags are too easily and too often seen stuck in kelp or high up in tree limbs, or floating away on the air and in water.

A key fact to know is how each bag will “live forever”. Many are likely to travel long distances while never fully breaking down, eventually entering the food chain while breaking off smaller and smaller pieces to be consumed by equally tiny creatures along the way. In fact, it is the science and research being conducted in this area which is causing most of the alarm.

There’s an estimation that 100,000 marine mammals and up to 1 million sea birds die every year after ingesting or being tangled in plastic marine litter.

So, perhaps an all out ban or at least a hefty tax on single-use plastic bags makes sense. They work. Any fellow volunteers who participate in annual beach cleanups over the many years know, the ban on ‘butts on the beach has significantly helped limit another dangerous and common beach pollutant. When you get down it, it’s all petroleum, right?

HOW TO HELP

Please show your support for this proposed Solana Beach ordinance simply by attending the hearing of the Solana Beach City Council and giving your own public comment in support of the Rise Above Plastics campaign from Surfrider.org

It is an opportunity to establish something meaningful, as Americans are consuming about one hundred BILLION plastic bags a year. Think about it. I mean, managing all those plastic bags is costly! California spends $25 million annually to landfill discarded plastic bags, and public agencies spend more than $300 million annually in litter cleanup.

Join others who wish to demonstrate sensible support by attending this public hearing on the proposed plastic bag reduction ordinance.

Related

I am discouraged by the license people who advocate certain positions grant to themselves to make up facts to support their positions. California spends $25 million to landfill plastic bags? The references you site don’t cite references, and each is an advocacy group. These “facts” become facts by being passed around willy nilly.

Here’s a true fact for you: plastic grocery bags are valuable. When they are recycled, the recovered resin is worth 50¢ per pound, more than the net recovered value of paper. I know this because I can turn grocery bags into valuable products, such as plastic lumber.

The whale video is cute. But saying than a million marine animals die each year is about as realistic as the whale in the video. It is a simulation. Someone’s unscientific guesstimate. If Big Oil put out something like this, you’d dismiss it as propaganda. If you want to be credible, please clean up your “research” environment.

Yes. More research is needed to establish more concrete numbers but plastics are too important to simply sit and wait. This article is about attending the Solana Beach meeting and voicing your opinion (btw: this was passed). But the facts do not lie, as your own comment confirms, that is, we needlessly rely upon too much single use plastic, e.g. 50cents per pound. Plastic bags have their own little cottage industry!

While plastic lumber sounds great as “propaganda”, is such a product a good alternative? Why would u even desire this? More petroleum products surrounding us in our homes or other structures? Solana Beach didnt wait for all “the numbers” to prove what we all can see with our eyes because we “dont need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”. For many choices, we often look to the leading indicators, in this case, which clearly point to a true need for making positive change.

I think your motivations are clear now, as you seem to making money from plastic bags and you do not actually desire a change to other exisiting or potential solutions.
Your website claims the cost of a plastic bag is only a penny but fail to consider the lifecycle of this poison. Part of your solution to manage plastic bags, too, is to cover our lands and gardens with a petroleum resin so your business will thrive.

You really believe using petroleum to cover our veggies and flowers is a good idea?
If you do, perhaps you believe brushing your teeth with used motor oil is also a good idea (of course, you should strain the oil first!). lol

Sometimes the numbers lie, especially since you only consider your own personal wealth. Really? You actually promote and hope more people buy your straw and spread it around their gardens?

And plastic lumber, as we see so many broken plastic fences, may sound like a good idea but easily cracks under minimal stress. We have seen this time and again with plastic lumber. One fence was professionally installed nearby. Within one month the gate was useless, and the remaining fenceline was cracking. After six months, the plastic fence was a safety hazard of splintering shards, and it was removed, and the frustrated owner sent the entire lot to the landfill. That about sums up plastic lumber.

Just as the unanimous vote in SB has done, Single use plastic bags are being banned around the globe, and this trend is likely to accelerate and spread. Stay tuned!

“We did not expect to find this,” says Scripps researcher Miriam Goldstein when comparing prior studies with most recent research”. When you go out into the North Pacific, what you find can be highly variable. So, to find such a clear pattern and such a large increase is very surprising and alarming.

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